Mystery Man and the Professor ride to the rescue!

Yesterday was what you would call a good day. I met Jim Stockford in the morning at 8:00 am in San Francisco, and he drove us from San Francisco down to San Jose to meet David Eisenberg, a local college professor, to pick up some computers that David had in storage. Fifteen computers, to be exact, all of which meet the Partimus specs, for deployment in public schools such as the Ascend school in Oakland.

We loaded all fifteen machines, with monitors, into Jim’s SUV and David’s sedan, and headed over to the Ascend school in Oakland, where we dropped off the machines with Ascend technology teacher Abigail Rudner and her volunteer assistant, Brianna Niver.

The next step for those machines will be for Abigail to install Lubuntu GNU-Linux on a few of the machines to replace some of the slower, older machines in her lab. In the meantime, Partimus volunteer Tai Kedzierski of Help Use IT is heading up a team to prepare a PXE boot and proxy server to help Abigail mass-install a specialized version of Lubuntu on each of the students’ machines. Here is a photo of the four of us who were still around at the very end of the delivery of the newer machines to Abigail’s Linux lab:

Professor Eisenberg not only acquired the 15 new machines for Partimus, he also stored them for a considerable time and then help load, unload, and drive them to Oakland. Thanks so much for your help and your remarkable donation, David!

But what about the Mystery Man, Jim Stockford? He is a frequent Partimus volunteer, Systems Engineer with Systemateka.com, and has been known to rock audiences at San Francisco Bay Area venues with a punk band called The Nubs. In fact, after graciously driving, loading and unloading machines for 3 hours that morning, he had to rush back to a head-banging band practice with said Nubs. And all he left behind was this mysterious photograph, so I guess you are just going to have to pay to the see the Nubs to see him in action:

Thanks very much to David Eisenberg, Abigail Rudner, Brianna Niver, and Mystery Man Jim Stockford for your great help!